[C++-sig] __repr__ and string values

[Dave Berton]

Consider a class which can represent itself as a string:

class Foo
{
public:
  std::string toString() { return "foo"; }
};

This is wrapped thus:

class_< Foo, boost::shared_ptr<Foo> >("Foo", "The Foo class" )
    .def(init< >())
    .def("toString", &Foo::toString )
    .def("__repr__", &Foo::toString )
    ;

When imported into python, I get different return values calling
Foo::toString() compared to when I let python get the return value
implicitly:

>>> from foo_ext import *
>>> f = Foo()
>>> f.toString()
'foo'
>>> f
foo

Why does the explicit call to Foo::toString() return a properly quoted
string while the implicit call invoked by python does not?  How should I
wrap Foo such that both ways of getting the string representation return
the same thing (a quoted string)?

db